This paper considers lexical items such as shoe, whose meaning can be construed more broadly or narrowly (i.e., as either including or excluding boots), and examines how this type of “vertical” meaning variation relates to the distinction between ambiguity and vagueness. I argue that the broader and narrower readings of a single lexical form can be treated as polysemous senses to the extent that they exhibit some symptoms of autonomy as contextually construed sense units. However, as some vertical polysemes’ senses also exhibit symptoms of unity, they fall in between ambiguity and vagueness. As word senses are here defined as contextually construed units of meaning, their autonomy is considered independently from their conventionality. However, a corpus study of pairs of words with a dual inclusion/contrast relationship (including shoe/boot, cup/mug, dog/bitch, meat/chicken and dog/puppy) suggests that even senses that exhibit a low degree of autonomy may nevertheless be conventionalised.

Metonymy and metaphor are commonly taken as cognitive phenomena in modern cognitive linguistics rather than as mere figures of speech. However, the correct cognitive demarcation between metonymy and metaphor is the subject of intense debate; there are also different attitudes to the cognitive basis of metonymy. The main contribution of this paper is to identify the cognitive mechanism called complex thinking, which is well-known in psychology but hardly applied in linguistics, as the cognitive basis for metonymy; the difference between complex and conceptual thinking is also highlighted in order to distinguish between conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor. Using a cultural-historical approach, we can conjecture that metonymy dominates in pre-theoretical cultures, whereas metaphor emerges in theoretical cultures alongside abstract conceptual domains. In order to illustrate these points with a brief case study, the semantic evolution of the ancient Greek word Ûlh (matter) is considered.

This article investigates the cognitive operations underlying the different uses of four main begin verbs in English, i.e. start, begin, commence and initiate, and the pragmatic implications connected with them. The study follows an analytical approach based on the Lexical Constructional Model and on more general but fundamental assumptions of Cognitive Linguistics, according to which grammar is conceptually motivated. Attention is paid to the effects produced at the structural level by our varying conceptualizations of occurrences indicating the inception of an activity, with a special focus on the metonymic and metaphoric processes governing and affecting lexical-syntactic and semantic-pragmatic representations. begin verbs are observed in their ability to be integrated into constructions that appear to be regulated by a well-defined set of constraints.

In 2011 I proposed a new approach to metaphor analysis and typology, based on the strict distinction between the material and phenomenological worlds. I concluded that the ultimate source domain (experiential basis) is the world of physical objects. The present paper develops these ideas, presenting a more detailed analysis of each of the metaphor types. Thus, I claim that the concrete-to-concrete metaphors are based on metonymy and abstract-to-concrete on the OBJECT schema. Abstract-to-abstract metaphorization falls into two traditional types: structural and orientational metaphors. As to the former, I show that the vague expressions “more concrete domain” or “more abstract domain” can be made clearer by considering the ontological status of the component elements of the domain: the “more concrete” domain has more elements of physical ontology. Orientational metaphors have been found to be only superficially orientational, their true objective being valuation. I conclude that all these metaphor types eventually refer to the world of physical objects for their experiential basis.

It is claimed that expressions that instantiate sequence is relative position on a path (e.g. Spring follows winter) are the only type of temporal expression in English in which two distinct entities metaphorically move. A possible motivation for why we do not find two Times-as-Movers going the opposite “direction” may be that people are not disposed to tracking two “nows”. It is further hypothesized that this could be a crosslinguistically common or universal tendency, and data relevant to the constraint are discussed for Japanese and Wolof (West Africa). This exercise documents and categorizes certain semantic relations (such as ahead/behind) that are relevant to the study of direction of motion in metaphors of time.

This paper proposes a view of the linguistic construction in Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) in which constructions are posited to be structured grammatical objects with a unique constructional signature that uniquely identifies them. We argue that the construction has an input and an output, and that it contains a local workspace in which the processing of the various lexical and grammatical rules applies, according to the constraints within the constructional object. In recent years there has been a growing recognition that the RRG account of constructions is an under-utilised resource that deserves a wider application to problems in cross-linguistic analysis (Nolan & Diedrichsen, 2013; Nolan & Periñán, 2014). As a functional grammar with strong claims of adequacy, RRG has however had several challenges from Construction Grammar (Butler & Martín Arista, 2009; Goldberg, 2006; Michaelis, 2006, 2010). This paper addresses a number of these challenges. In the view of constructions presented here, the linking over the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic interfaces resides in the body of the construction, and the construction interacts with the lexicon which provides lexical information relevant to the construction. The constructions reside in a construction repository. This model of constructions delivers a means to address the challenges posed to the RRG account of the role and place of constructions within a lexicalist functionalist model of grammar.

This paper explores both the polysemy and the development of the adverb apenas ‘barely hardly’ into a discourse marker of temporal proximity ‘just/recently’. In contrast to well-known expected tendencies in grammaticalization, apenas runs against the cannon. The subjective adverb apenas, that designates events carried out “with effort/difficulty”, changed into an objective connector signaling immediacy among events or proximity to the time of speech. The polysemy of apenas is accounted for both synchronically and diachronically, as the interaction between the force-dynamics configuration of the marker (Talmy, 1985, 1988) and the aspectual configuration of the verb. It is proposed that aspect determines the degree of subjectivity of the event where telicity triggers objective representations and these, in turn, led the way for the emergence of a discourse marker of temporal proximity.

The complexities of the interaction of modality and negation are well-known. They mainly arise from different scopes of negation. Thus, the negation in You mustn’t go has narrow scope while the negation in You can’t go has wide scope. This study adopts a cognitive approach to the issue of scope in negated modality. It examines negated modals within a conceptual matrix developed on the basis of conceptual distinctions that are crucial to modality. The distribution of negated modal verbs within the conceptual matrix reveals which modal concepts are coded in a given language and which ones are not. The study focuses on the system of English negated modals but also compares it to the systems of German, Dutch and Norwegian. In all four languages, the predominant way of negating modals is by using wide-scope negation. German, in fact, wholly relies on wide-scope negation, while English makes use of both scopes of negation. Its mixed nature leads to a number of “irregularities” in the use of modals, which, however, can still be shown to be motivated.